A bilingual Ukrainian magazine may be forced to halt operations in Ukraine’s western Lviv Oblast due to a law restricting Russian-language cultural products.
The magazine SHO writes about culture and the arts in both Ukrainian and Russian, as it has done for 13 years.
But now a Lviv delivery company, which has worked with SHO for years, has warned the publication’s editorial office that it would have to stop cooperation with the magazine if SHO did not switch completely to the Ukrainian language, editor-in-chief Alexandr Kabanov wrote on Facebook.
The delivery company grounds its decision on a Sept. 18 moratorium on Russian passed by the Lviv Oblast Administration. The moratorium reportedly forbids “any public use of Russian cultural production in any form in Lviv Oblast until Russia stop its occupation of Ukrainian territory.”
The cover of Ukrainian cultural magazine SHO portrays Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko as a superhero. This issue was published in March–April 2016.
The Lviv Oblast Administration “recommended” all the city councils in Lviv Oblast to adopt this moratorium and create working groups to “systematically inform physical and legal entities about the moratorium.”
This means that media like SHO will have to halt their operations across Lviv Oblast. This is likely the first public case when a publication has been warned by a third party to switch to Ukrainian in Lviv since the decision.
Kabanov doesn’t blame the Lviv delivery company, and says he understands it is just transmitting the orders it received from the local Lviv authorities.
But his magazine is quite popular in Lviv, with 300–350 subscribers in the city receiving print copies. That “is a lot (of subscribers) in modern times,” Kabanov wrote on Facebook, stressing that his magazine is bilingual and has been since its first issue in 2005. A print copy costs up to $5, while an electronic version is slightly more than $1.
Kabanov did not immediately respond to the Kyiv Post’s request for a comment. But, writing on Facebook, he suggested the Constitution of Ukraine guarantees his right to speak and publish in Russian.
“That’s our right (to have content in Russian). We aren’t a government firm that has to come out in the official language. We are a grant-based enterprise. And the government must protect and promote us, according to the Constitution,” Kabanov wrote. “Otherwise, it is an obvious language-based genocide.”
Meanwhile, on Oct. 4, the Verkhovna Rada passed a new language bill in its first reading. Bill No. 5670 also aims to strengthen and promote the use of Ukrainian over other languages. One of its articles stipulates that all media in Ukraine — print, online, or television — have to be in Ukrainian.
If passed, that bill would threaten SHO’s circulation not just in Lviv Oblast, but throughout Ukraine. The English-language Kyiv Post may cease to exist.
Under the draft law, newspapers and magazines can be published in other languages only if they also produce a Ukrainian version of the same size and content. For many media, that would be an expensive and impossible task.
